When I was a student and a wrestler at Cascade Junior High School in 1974 — not a good one, I admit — there was in the hall outside the wrestling room and the showers an ancient, candy-dispensing machine of the grim, gray industrial-looking sort one used to find in theater lobbies or at Boeing surplus sales.

This one held red delicious apples. But no ordinary apples.

After a hard workout under our grappling coach, Sam Janke, we fought each other — sort of — for those apples, big guys against shrimps like me. We small guys often lost the skirmishes. But when I did get hold of one of those beauties, mama mia! I don’t know if anything I have ever eaten to this day can match them for sheer cold deliciousness.

For my dad, a similar sweet memory was delivered by a cup of Coke filled with ice, sipped as he waited on the blazing platform of a bus station in the heat of a New York City summer in 1948.

“I never tasted anything so refreshing in my life,” he said.

Call it the sweetness of life.

We human beings get so used to enjoying the things we love — the tang of our brother-in-law Galen’s marinara sauce, our grandmother Evelyn’s chicken, a walk in the cool of the evening with a friend or sweetheart amongst “the fragrant pines and the cedars dusk and dim,” the peak moments of our abilities — that we may not give the whole “sweetness of life” subject much thought.

I didn’t give it much though either until the last five weeks or so. That’s when all that now afflicts me — diabetes, cancer, the crippling pain in my side that makes walking or any other activity tough — began at once to bite deeply at my bones.

Now, it’s no secret that chemotherapy and age dulls the taste buds, impairs one’s mobility, fogs the memory. You get cancer, you expect these things. You get old, you expect these things. But when their effects really kick in, when sweetness looks you sorrowfully in the eyes and begins to pull away until she just touches the ends of your fingers, it can become a serious bummer.

Many of the works I read as a kid — remember, I am an introvert — are now dropping from my memory like the fallen stones of an ancient fence. If I work hard, I can get most of them back, but it’s not the same.

I can no longer stand for more than 10 minutes without sitting down again to relieve the pain in my side from, well, I don’t know what. I am awaiting the results of a needle biopsy from last week. Until it is excised, I cannot help Ann much around the house, or play with our German Shepherd puppy.

Truth is, however, I am not, as far as I know, near my end. Doctors say there is no telling how much more time I may have before I end up drooling on a lobster bib.

Learning has always been there for me. It came easily, and it has helped me immensely in my work. But keeping things in my head is now a bit more difficult. It appears I may have to find some new sustaining purpose in life. I am working out what that will be, but as of now, I don’t have the answer.

Yet, like the aging, restless Ulysses, now the bored king of Ithaca in Tennyson’s “Ulysses,” I am not giving up. Follow him as he cajoles the mariners with whom he’d returned from conquered Troy years before, now grown old, onto new adventures:

“Tho’ much is taken much abides, and tho’

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will,

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”

I, too, am not ready to concede.

Robert Whale can be reached at robert.whale@auburn-reporter.com.